


Burning Red

by voidwaren



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Storm in Arcadia Bay (Life is Strange), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Language, Past Abuse, Post-Time Skip, Ten Years Later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:26:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22196254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidwaren/pseuds/voidwaren
Summary: Nathan Prescott was a cacophony of colors in Warren Graham’s head; blue, gray, red memories he could never manage to forget. Ten years ago, Warren found Nathan breaking down in the dormitory showers and ended up tangled in more Prescott than he ever anticipated. Ten years ago, Nathan Prescott left Warren in those showers and never returned. Ten years ago, Nathan Prescott was arrested for his involvement in the murder of Rachel Amber.The Prescott family was ruined. Arcadia Bay moved on. Arcadia Bay forgot.Warren Graham moved on, but he couldn't forget. And he'd tried.God, he'd tried.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield & Warren Graham, Warren Graham/Nathan Prescott
Comments: 24
Kudos: 90
Collections: My Life is Strange collection





	1. Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not totally sure what this is. I just had an idea and ran with it, and here we are. If you’re here from my W/S AU, this might not end up being to your taste because it’s pretty damn different, but, hey. We all have our vices. Thanks for clicking anyway!
> 
> Also: pardon the tags. I'm failing to think of all the right ones at the moment of posting, which I'll fix later. Expect nothing worse than the game, though, because that game was _heavy_ , and I don't think this fic will come close to that.

“Can you believe we’re back in this shit place?” was Max’s greeting when Warren found her at the bus stop outside the airport in Oregon. She reached up and pulled Warren down into a hug, holding him tight like she hadn’t just seen him two weeks ago at a convention in New York City. “God, they better be putting us up in the Ritz for this. Or, whatever Arcadia Bay’s equivalent of the Ritz is. I could be in Bali right now.”

“Please,” Warren replied once he was released, loading as much ire into the one word as he could while he picked up his and Max’s bags and loaded them onto the bus that would take them into Arcadia Bay, “like you wouldn’t come back just to gloat.”

Max’s smile was award-winning, something Warren knew she picked up from one too many gallery shows with people so stuck up the money trees that grew up their asses nearly leaked dollar bills out of their upturned noses.

“Yeeeeah,” she agreed, drawling the word out. “I can’t wait to find everyone I used to know that never left and show them this hipster kid made it big. And what about you, Mr. I’m-so-fly-I-discovered-why-antimatter-vanishes?”

Warren opened his mouth to correct her, because that wasn’t even close to accurate, but then Max held her hand up and neatly cut him off. “Save it for the lecture, would you?”

Warren glowered at her. “You picked that up from Chloe.”

“You pick up a lot in ten years. _God,”_ Max groaned, then dropped her head into her hands as she plopped into the uncomfortable seat at the back of the bus. “Ten years! We’re getting so old, Warren!”

Warren followed suit. “Don’t remind me. I just want to know what’s changed, give my lecture, and then get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, man, I bet so much has. I haven’t been back here since Joyce sold the diner and moved out. Do you think it’s even still standing?”

She looked almost worried about the fact it might be gone, so Warren patted her shoulder and told her, “No way. That thing’s a national landmark at this point. Not even Godzilla could bear to take that thing down.”

She gave him a dubious smile, but a smile nonetheless. Her phone beeped from the bag at her side, and she started to rummage around for it immediately without breaking conversation.

“Right. I guess I can’t complain about it when I didn’t come back here on my own terms anyway. I have a reputation at this point for only come back to Arcadia Bay for Blackwell Academy, and I will not be tarnishing that.” She dropped her voice and muttered, pseudo-bitterly, “Couldn’t even get Chloe to come back with me this time, the hypocrite.”

Warren couldn’t blame her. Chloe had wanted to get out of Arcadia Bay for longer than Warren had personally known her. Going back just felt like walking back into a trap.

“Not a whole lot to come back for. Notice how everyone we went to school that managed to leave has never come back?”

“Tell me about it. Alyssa refused the offer to give a lecture, she wanted to stay away so badly. I heard Nathan Prescott just got out of prison, too. Bet he can't wait to get the hell out of dodge,” Max continued idly, barely even looking at her phone as she typed something out on its screen. She gave Warren a wry smile. “Remember him?”

“Nathan Prescott?” Warren repeated, tilting his head back until it touched against the dirty window.

_A quiet call into a wet, darkened room. A sob, a cry, a breakdown he didn’t understand in the dead of the night. A boy he didn’t want to know, turned to someone he could suddenly understand._

_Comfort, surprisingly given, turned to fire, turned to boiling blood. Turned to want, turned to need. A single, questioning touch, and then it all had spiraled from there._

_Hands twisted into his hair, the taste of a late smoke ghosting along his lips, teeth pressing deep and nails raked along his spine, the heat of his skin, his words, his anger, flaring hot and burning deep as he leaned in close and gave into him—_

“No,” Warren said after a moment. “I forgot all about him.”

Max frowned at him. “I wish I could be so lucky. His arrest ruined everything I applied to Blackwell for. I had to go anyway, and I didn’t even get what I paid for.”

Warren snorted and lifted his head again. “You mean you wanted to be taught by someone who was murdering his students?”

“I mean, it would make things interesting, wouldn’t it?”

“Mm,” Warren hummed skeptically. “Not quite what I would call it, but alright.”

“You’re not an artist. You wouldn’t understand.”

And Warren didn’t want to. Mark Jefferson had been convicted as a murderer and thrown in prison five states away for the rest of his life. He couldn’t see any reason to wish that had ended up any differently, but Max had always been a little weird, even for a photographer.

Message apparently relayed, Max set her phone aside and shifted until she could rest her elbows on her knees, tilting her head to peer up at Warren. “What was Nathan like, anyway? I hear terrible stories about him all the time from Kate and Chloe, but Vic never says a word except to defend him. I don’t know who to believe.”

“Nathan was a nutcase,” said Warren wrly. “He was the school bully, and had the name and money to back it up without getting in trouble. No one liked Nathan, not even his friends.”

“Hmm. Am I sensing some deep-buried animosity towards this school bully?”

Warren frowned at her.

_“This never happened,” Nathan choked, pulling on his jacket so fast he nearly punched himself, falling against the frozen tiles. His hair was pasted along his forehead with sweat, and the purple circles under his eyes were rendered to a pitted black in the low light. He looked like his own ghost._

_He sounded like he was pleading._

_“This never happened,” he repeated, and this time he jabbed a finger in Warren’s direction. “If you say anything,_ anything, _I’ll ruin your entire life.”_

_Warren had said nothing—not after, and not then—only watched as Nathan pressed himself against the walls of the shower stall and struggled to breathe through his gasping sobs. He barely made any noise._

_Warren reclaimed his shirt and pulled it on, wanting nothing more than to reach out and touch Nathan despite who he was, and knowing,_ because _of who he was, that touching Nathan was something Warren could never do again._

_A single night, all a handful of hours at most, and Warren had managed to feel something for someone who didn’t even know his name. Some who, when he’d walked into that shower room that night, Warren had just wanted to make sure was alright._

_Life was a bitch, and, damn, did she know it._

“I didn’t escape his reign of terror, no,” Warren admitted. He raised his hands in a shrug. “He was king, and he used it. I was a lowly nerd just trying to get through school with his two front teeth intact.”

Outside the window, the junkyard meandered by, metal pipes poking out from behind a rotting wooden fence and a sign that vaguely read “Prescott Foundation” in faded, red lettering atop a rotting pile of debris.

Max pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, gesturing to the sign as it glided out of view. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

Warren couldn’t help the snort that escaped him. “Putting it lightly, aren’t you? His whole family used to rule this town. It was almost scary, the things they were able to get away with. The stuff you’d hear down at the harbor.” Warren shook his head. “One massive slip up, and now they’re all gone.”

“All the news columns said they’d been looking for a reason to get the whole family at once,” Max said. “I guess murder is a big enough reason.”

Warren hesitated. He’d read all the same columns Max had, maybe more, during the months that the Prescott family had been on trial for their involvement with Mark Jefferson and the murder of Rachel Amber. She had been the first attack in Arcadia Bay, but Jefferson had a long-standing trail he’d been covering up for years, and it all had been steadily unearthed as more and more cold cases were found linked to places Jefferson had lived and worked. He’d had a method to his murder, and the Prescotts had gotten involved and dug their own grave.

It had been a fascinating trial, one that ruined the Prescott name so completely that more than half of the family had been incarcerated, and the remaining member, a woman named Kristine Prescott, sister of Nathan, had permanently left the States to work on the other side of the world and hadn’t been seen since. Warren wouldn’t be surprised if she'd changed her name.

It had been fascinating, and it had also been one of the most painful things Warren had ever had to live through.

“Do you think he did it?” Max asked quietly, and Warren turned to blink at her. She spoke gently, like she knew Warren somehow had ties with the case. But that wasn’t possible, because he’d never told anyone about that night, and she’d have no way to know.

“Nathan?” Warren replied, a flimsy attempt at keeping his cool. He was usually better at thinking on his feet, but being in Arcadia Bay did something to him, and he found himself reverting back to that awkward, hesitant kid he’d been all those years ago.

“I know I asked you this back when it happened,” said Max instead of answering his obvious question, “but you’ve never actually given me a straight answer.”

Hadn’t he?

Warren faltered, his mind suddenly racing. The ruling for Nathan Prescott had been accessory to the muder, among other things, and Warren had never been able to think of a reason why that ruling was wrong. But some people—many people, who found faith in Mark Jefferson over the kid he’d apprenticed during his short time in the bay—thought he’d been more than just a hand in the crime. They thought he’d actually done it. Alone.

But … did Warren?

_Warren was starting to shiver in the cold of the empty bathroom, the thin material of his pajamas doing little against the temperature of the night. He still hadn’t moved from where Nathan basically had him cornered in that stall, and his lip was starting to sting viciously where Nathan had bitten it too hard. He wanted to do something—anything—to help the boy he’d been so quick to comfort just before, but he also didn’t want to scare Nathan away now that so much had managed to pass since that first attempt. So he didn’t move._

_“Fuck,” Nathan cursed, his eyes squeezed shut against the heels of his fists, making Warren give his attention back to him. “Fuck! I don’t want to do this!”_

_“Do what?” Warren had finally asked—the first thing he’d said since Nathan had stolen his breath away and refused to give it back._

_Nathan startled like he’d forgotten Warren was there. “Shit,” he hissed. “No, shit. None of your business. You’ll—You’ll know by tomorrow. Probably.”_

_Warren felt his heart stutter in his chest._

_“What are you going to do?”_

_Nathan dropped his hands and looked at Warren. He looked tired then, like he’d lived a few too many lives in the short amount of time it had taken him to stop going at Warren with his teeth and nails. His lower lip trembled, then stretched thin in a grimace. His blue eyes hardened in his face._

_“I’m going to save everyone,” he declared. Before Warren could compute that statement, Nathan turned and wrenched the shower curtain open with an ear-piercing squeal of metal scraping metal, but then he hesitated, the cheap, grimy material clutched tight in his fingers. The red of his jacket was loud, and it commanded all the color in the room._

_He looked over his shoulder at Warren, his hair obscuring parts of his face, and he opened his mouth as if to say something. But nothing came out, and his face collapsed into a portrait of despair._

_“What are you talking about?” asked Warren hesitantly, and he reached a hand out towards Nathan to press his fingers against the fabric covering his back. It was a dangerous gesture, one that Nathan didn’t seem to feel. “What’s happening? What are you saving everyone from?”_

_Warren felt the way Nathan stiffened against his questions, and he knew he’d lost him before he even spoke._

_“Me,” Nathan said quietly, and then he stumbled out of the shower and left the room. Warren heard the faint echo of the heavy dormitory door closing, and he knew, somehow, that Nathan Prescott was not coming back._

_The next day, Nathan was gone._

Max reached out and held Warren’s hand when the silence stretched between them, her question unanswered. Her palm was warm against his clammy one, and he laced his fingers through hers unconsciously.

Warren had never forgotten Nathan Prescott. He only wished he had.

* * *

Blackwell Academy had the audacity not to change a bit in the years Warren had been gone, and it sparked a sour kind of nostalgia in his gut the second he stepped out of the Uber and onto the sidewalk before it. Max was talking to the driver still, and he left her behind and meandered his way up the stairs, his tennis shoes scraping along the rough pavement as the lawn stretched out before him, empty as a ghost town. The kids were off for vacation, and he remembered how quiet it got when only the kids who didn’t want to leave stayed behind. He’d done that more than a few times himself during his Blackwell years—spurned into staying by a particularly tricky experiment he was working on—and they were some of his favorite memories of the school, having so much of it to call his own.

They would be back tomorrow for their first day, and the lectures he, Max, and a few others would be giving, but for today, the school was silent and imposing. And, god, Warren missed it.

“One look and I already want to run screaming,” Max said as she appeared by his side. She wasn’t smiling as she stared down the brick monstrosity that was their school.

“You act like you had a terrible time here.”

“You act like I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t,” Warren pointed out. Max eyed him, and he continued, “That first semester, sure, sucked in the wake of the bullshit the murder investigation brought, but you can’t tell me we didn’t have a great time once that all wrapped up. We were menaces on society and you know it. We made sure we went out with a bang.”

A slow smile spread on Max’s lips. “Okay, yeah. We did. Remember when we all snuck into the pool at midnight that one time because Chloe wanted to go swimming?”

“Jesus, yes. And how we almost got in so much trouble when David showed up out of nowhere. God,” Warren held his chest, “that was the most scared I’d ever been in my short life.”

“We’re lucky Victoria was able to think on her feet with that pool noodle, or we all would have been screwed into the new year. And it was February!”

Warren laughed. “Kate would have _killed_ you.”

“She would not have!” Max feigned offense. “Kate loves me.”

“Kate can bite if you mess with something she’s proud of. Like her school record.”

Max narrowed her eyes. “Are we talking about the same Kate? Kate Marsh? The same Kate that dresses up every time a school asks her to come in and read her books to the kids? That Kate?”

“Okay, fine, maybe she can’t,” Warren amended. “ _I_ would have killed you, though.”

“I would have liked to see you try,” Max said sweetly, then grabbed his arm and started across the lawn as a man appeared in the doorway to the school.

He greeted them when they reached the doors, introducing himself as the new principal of the academy, and then proceeded to walk them through the halls that, even in ten years, had not changed more than the posters that adorned its corners as he explained how the following day would go. There were five lecturers—two for the sciences and three for the arts—pulled from the top graduates of the academy over the years, and Warren was scheduled for the second slot of the day, Max the fourth. He reiterated much of what was discussed via email as he walked them along, and Warren found his mind wandering as stale information passed him by.

Everything was the same. It was as jarring as it was nostalgic, and Warren couldn’t help but wonder—were the dormitories the same?

_There had been a choking sound, quiet but sharp, coming from the showers the night Warren had emerged from the restrooms for a late-night bathroom break. It had been three in the morning—way past curfew—and everyone else had either been dead asleep, or they were acting like it._

_Warren, being the kind of guy he was, didn’t bother to simply ignore it. He investigated._

_“Hello?” Warren had called, tentatively stepping over the threshold of the showers and sticking his head in. The choking abruptly stopped. “Are you okay?” he tried when no one answered him, and then, when still nothing came, he walked over to the only closed shower and said, quietly, “Are you … alive in there?”_

_“Fuck off,” was what finally came, followed closely by another one of those choked noises that Warren realized suddenly were actually sobs. He couldn’t identify the voice, not beneath all the grief it held, but he felt his sympathy kick in regardless._

_“I don’t think I can just do that,” admitted Warren, and silence followed his declaration._

_Then, a strangled “Shit” came forth, and the sobbing started up again._

_“I’m— I’m coming in,” Warren warned, too tired from his late night excursion through the wonders of pirated media and jumped up on a few too many energy drinks to really think about the potential consequences, and then he parted the curtain just enough to step in._

_To say he was not expecting Nathan Prescott on the other side would have been so vast an understatement, Nathan might as well have been the Spanish Inquisition and Warren an unsuspecting English townsperson._

_He looked so far from the Nathan Prescott Warren knew, though, that Warren wasn’t so sure he could claim the meeting at a later date, should he ever want to. The clothes he wore were Nathan’s; the face he wore was Nathan's; Warren even had no doubt the name, should he have spoken it, would be claimed by the boy before him, despite also belonging to Nathan. But the expression the boy wore—pain, terror, loss etched into the tear-tracks on his cheeks, the lines that formed when the surprise gave way to weeping once again—was not one Warren had ever seen before on Nathan Prescott, nor was it one he would ever have thought Nathan Prescott could wear._

_But it_ was _Nathan Prescott. Crying in a shower stall, looking like the shell of the person Warren knew him as._

_“Oh,” was all Warren had managed to say upon realizing who it was, and it seemed to be enough to set Nathan off again._

_He pressed deeper into the shower stall and raised his arms to cover his face completely, his jacket creating a violent wall of red between Nathan’s face and Warren’s startled existence._

_“Leave me alone,” he snarled, but it was weak. And Warren couldn’t move. Not until the choking had started up again, not until one of Nathan’s arms had dropped away from the makeshift fortress he had created around his face to press a hand to his mouth hard enough that no sound escaped did Warren move, and then it was like he couldn’t_ stop _moving._

_Nathan had startled when Warren had first reached out and placed a hand on his arm, his free hand snapping out to clutch painfully, desperately, at Warren’s shoulder, his eyes searching Warren’s face like he found him as a threat. But Warren had pushed on despite the reaction, using his other arm to hold a hand up in assurance he wasn’t going to do anything, and Nathan had blinked in confusion until he understood._

_A war seemed to break out on the surface of Nathan’s face as it twisted between expressions, but eventually the grief—whatever the source was—overtook it all, and Nathan crumpled in on himself before a conclusion could be reached between him and Warren._

_So Warren had taken the matter back into his own hands, coaxing slowly through the only motions he knew, the ones he learned from his parents over the years of growing up with nightmares, bullies, and one too many failed experiments, until Nathan finally gave in and allowed himself to be held._

_That had been the majority of Warren’s actions in that shower stall from there, simply standing in the cold, damp enclosure that was one of the boy’s shower stalls and holding Nathan Prescott as he held onto Warren’s shirt with both fists and choked on the air he breathed, mourning something Warren couldn’t even begin to understand._

_That had been the majority of Warren’s actions—until Nathan had lifted his head up to face him, and looked so utterly broken that Warren couldn’t help what he’d done next: he’d reached a hand up and held Nathan’s face still as he pressed his idea of a comforting kiss to Nathan’s cheek—_

_—and it all had spiraled from there._

Warren flinched back on himself as the memories all flooded in, willing his cheeks not to redden as details he’d never been able to forget pushed themselves to the forefront of his mind. Things like the way Nathan smelled ( _a mix of smoke, an expensive cologne, and a strange chemical smell Warren had never been able to place_ ), the way Nathan tasted ( _bitter and salty, the product of a previous smoke and too many tears_ ), and the way Nathan felt ( _broken, brittle, like he was holding it all together with scraps of who he was and the memories of who he had been were fading fast_ ) battled for dominance on the planes of Warren’s brain.

Warren had never been able to forget Nathan, and being back in Arcadia Bay wasn’t helping anything.

Jesus, and what were the odds Nathan Prescott was already out of prison the single time Warren had ever been back in the bay? Sure, it wasn’t as if Warren was going to run into Nathan, and he _knew_ that, but the idea of him being free and roaming around the town—well, it didn’t exactly sit well with Warren’s nerves. And, anyway, Nathan had probably forgotten the night completely in the wake of what he’d gone through the following morning, whereas Warren, who had been sixteen and kissed maybe two people prior to the make out session he’d had with Blackwell’s biggest threat, had managed to not forget a single goddamn detail about the interaction.

It was embarrassing to a degree Warren had no words for.

There wasn’t a chance in hell he’d run into Nathan Prescott—and that was final.

“Is the diner still around?” Max asked, and Warren was brought back to the present to find himself standing back at the front doors, the principal looming before them with a smile plastered on his face.

“The Two Whales?” The man—Warren had already forgotten his name—tilted his head as he thought. “Yeah, it’s a favorite of the students. The bus still goes straight there.”

Max turned an excited grin on Warren. “Well, I know where I’ll be going tomorrow morning.”

“Wait,” Warren said, frowning. “You’re not going to go now?”

“No way, I want to walk around the school some more. See the things I forgot I missed. Don’t you?”

_Teeth against his lip, pressing deep and sharp and painful, the cold of the shower tile biting into his back where Nathan’s hands had rucked Warren's shirt up to get at his sides—_

Warren cleared his throat. “No, uh. I’m starving. I think I’ll hop over and grab something to eat.”

“Alright, captain.” Max shrugged. “Meet you back at the hotel?”

“Definitely. We’ll do something tonight.” Warren held his hand out, and the principal took it. “Thanks for the tour. I’ll see you tomorrow at the lecture.”

“It was a pleasure,” the principal said, and the white of his teeth was downright blinding.

* * *

Despite changing owners at least twice since Joyce had called it quits on Arcadia Bay and sold the establishment to move closer to Chloe, the diner didn’t look any different from how Warren remembered it. At least, not from the outside.

It still looked like a diner pulled from a movie set in the 50s, where diners were the place to be and you could find people perched at the front bar waiting for their sodas and their shakes and discussing the latest school dance they were waiting for from behind their straws. The sign of the two whales still perched on the top, though it looked newer than Warren remembered it looking the last time he’d been there, and he wondered if it had gotten either cleaned or replaced.

The door was still the ugliest shade of brown he’d ever seen, and it still jingled when he pushed it open and walked through. He saw immediately that the booth he always sat in—the same booth he had haunted along with Max and Chloe and Kate and Victoria over the years they’d had together after running around town and taking the wildest kinds of pictures Warren could never have dreamed up—was occupied, and Warren allowed himself to feel the small disappointment before deciding he might as well sit on the other, smaller side of the diner, knowing Max would probably secure his favorite spot in the morning when they went for coffee and breakfast before their lectures.

So, instead of walking ahead, Warren turned the corner, and subsequently felt his heart plummeting to his feet almost before his eyes could register what it was they were seeing.

Because Warren turned the corner, and there was Nathan Prescott.

His hair was shorn short, military-style, and there was a scar running through one of his eyebrows that Warren had never seen before, but he was Nathan Prescott all the same.

Nathan Prescott. Sitting in a booth. Minding his own damn business.

So much for no chance of running into him.

 _He won’t remember you,_ Warren told himself, even as he stood rooted on the spot. _He can’t remember you._

But then Nathan looked up, his sharp blue eyes widening behind his wire-framed glasses, and Warren knew he was wrong.

Nathan Prescott had never forgotten.

Shit.


	2. Gray

Blue. Gray. Red.

_His eyes, his thoughts, his jacket, his face._

Warren remembered Nathan in colors.

 _His fear. His loss. His regret. His need—always his_ need.

Scraps of a time where he hadn’t known just who he was and Nathan had been nothing but a challenge Warren had no want to ever engage, only to encounter him on a night just before he was taken away and Warren wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore—for that night to be a handful of hours where Warren walked away worrying about Nathan in ways he never knew he was capable of.

Nathan. Nathan _Prescott_ , the asshole of Arcadia Bay. The rich bitch king that tormented them all. Turned into a creature Warren found hiding in the dark of the dorm showers, tuned into a mess of a human Warren had, shockingly and against his own better judgement, felt such a sharp pity for that he was incapable of fleeing the scene and leaving Nathan to rot in his own aftermath.

He still hadn’t known Nathan beyond what he’d projected himself as to the entirety of the academy after that night, but that hadn’t stopped him from obsessing over Nathan in the many years that followed the chance encounter. Hadn’t stopped him from borderline succumbing to the world that surrounded Nathan Prescott, and the mystery his life had become since he left the rest of them in the dust of his catastrophe.

Warren had never stopped thinking about Nathan Prescott, had never forgotten him despite what he might have said otherwise—and, maybe, Nathan had not forgotten Warren, either. Warren couldn’t help but assume not, not from the way he looked at Warren when he was caught sitting in that booth, like he was replaying everything that had happened between them in the few seconds their eyes had locked together in surprise.

Warren, however, did not find out if Nathan had forgotten him that evening he ran into him. Like the twenty-six-year-old adult he was, Warren had turned on his heel and booked it from the diner before a single word could be exchanged, nearly taking out a child in the parking lot as he ran away from the diner and called for an Uber a full two blocks away from the establishment.

Warren had fled, and then he’d spent the entirety of that night mentally cursing himself into such a tizzy that Max had not only noticed, but threatened to manhandle the reason for it out of him when he refused to come forth on his own. Despite the threat, he still hadn’t budged and spilled to her—and she didn’t make good on her threat, because she wasn’t Chloe or Victoria, and her bark did not usually come with so direct a bite. Max’s wrath was subtle, and Warren knew, despite his secrets, that he was safe from her, and the night passed on without them being spoken.

Warren barely slept.

He was not a creature that knew nothing of the night, however, so when morning came and he was scheduled to give his lecture on a handful of hours of rest and enough milligrams of caffeine running through his bloodstream to potentially kill a small mammal, he did so easily—excitedly, even—in a way only a person married to their work can really do, or so he’d been told by Chloe, and then Alyssa, when they had both sat in on one of the traveling presentations he gave a few years ago to a myriad of universities before settling down as a adjunct with more experience under his belt than the professor he worked with.

He did fine with the lecture—he did great, even, if he did say so himself—and the whole spiel went smoothly and beautifully, and Warren had managed to completely purge anything and everything about Nathan Prescott from his mind in the midst of it. He was at peace. A slightly jittery, maybe a little manic peace, sure, but peace all the same for that scant couple of hours he was allowed to just talk and talk and talk about the things he could never get enough of. A peace he needed. A peace he thought he was going to get when he first agreed to do this gig.

And, honestly, he should have known better than that from a place like Arcadia Bay.

He was standing at the podium when it happened, pulling his papers into their respective folders and putting his laptop away as the students filtered out of the auditorium for their break before the next lecture—an art-related one from someone that came after Warren’s time at the academy—when he realized, from the corner of his eye, that someone was still sitting in the seats. The lights they had kept on him had been a little too bright, glaring him from seeing too far back into the small, neat gathering of chairs, so he couldn’t see a face. But he knew who it was all the same. She was always lurking, always watching from the sidelines.

Warren threw his paper-stuffed satchel over his shoulder and jumped down from the podium with the same amount of exuberance one of the students might give the action. Which, at twenty-six, with an ankle injured a few too many times from a variety of altercations with big, mean, metal machines that cared little for his lunch money and even less for his inability to walk straight when he was excited about something, was not his best move. He stumbled, only a little, but managed to keep from eating the old, musty carpet below the stage, if only just.

“Parkour!” he called cheerily to Max, bowing slightly at the joke that painfully showed his age. He made his way off the stage, relieved when the heat of the lights wasn’t giving him some alien-abduction-induced form of PTSD. “So, think you can do better than that when your time comes, Max Power?”

To his endless surprise, Max’s response came from behind him. From the curtains of the stage where he’d just stumbled from. “Not on my life, Dr. Graham. I’m going to need some of whatever the hell you put in your coffee this morning, though, because yikes, that was borderline _rabid_ ,” she continued, but Warren had stopped listening. His ears had started ringing in a panic, and he was frozen on the spot where he stood, somewhere in the aisle between the stage and the still-occupied seat.

Because Max was behind him, having watched him, just as he’d said before, from the sidelines, and the person sitting in the seat before him was _not_ her, but was instead the owner of a pair of blue eyes, silver-rimmed glasses, and a damn eyebrow scar that was annoyingly and aggressively attractive, most likely earned somewhere in the brutal throes of the prison he'd been held in.

Nathan Prescott. Again.

Deja _fucking_ vu.

Warren’s heart was suddenly nestled snug somewhere in his throat, and he couldn’t fucking _breathe._

Nathan had not been at the diner that next morning when Max and Warren had shown up for breakfast, despite Warren’s jittery, nervous worry that he might be. And Warren had assumed it was over.

Bad happenstance.

Chance meeting.

Dead and done.

Until now. Right now, right there. Right in front of Nathan Prescott, yet again, as he sat there and eyed up Warren like he was daring him to run away a second time.

It was like a bad movie in the making, and Warren didn’t know how to call cut and make it stop.

And as if Nathan were on the same train of thought as Warren was, he tilted his head and said, almost so quietly he couldn’t be heard, “Can’t get away from me this time, Warren Graham.”

“I—” Warren tried, but any and all words died in his throat.

Max, the angel that she was, must have noticed Warren’s uncharacteristic lack of response to her reply, because she called his name out, and Warren could hear her “professional adult shoes” she insisted on wearing where Warren still wore the same sneakers he wore to every event that didn’t call for a suit and tie beating a staccato into the cavernous air. They tapped loudly, hastily, against the wood of the stage floor, and Warren knew his rescue was coming.

And yet, Nathan didn’t move and inch. His gaze was centered on Warren’s face unblinkingly, like time had stopped for him while it continued to move all around him and he was frozen on the spot, his blue eyes boring holes into Warren’s where Warren found he couldn’t look away. His gaze wasn’t cold by any means, only curious, and maybe a little heated even, but Warren knew his own was startled, like a rabbit facing down a fox. They stared each other down, Nathan still without blinking from behind the shield of his glasses where Warren had winced his eyes shut more than once, until Max’s shoes stopped making sounds, and Warren knew she had reached the carpet and was closing in fast.

Warren’s knight in shining armor. He owed her a strong drink or three after this one. And maybe a new pack of film. And also his firstborn.

Nathan’s eyes finally broke away to look down the aisle, and Warren felt as if he could melt right into the floor the second he was free. Instead, he turned just enough to see Max coming, and suddenly it was like he was peering into a looking glass to the past.

Max had been somber that morning, like being in the bay was turning her back into the mild girl with the hidden wit she’d been at eighteen rather than the quick-tongued whiplash she’d turned into once confidence and Chloe kicked in, and it had extended to then, in that moment, as she frowned her way down the aisle of the auditorium to Warren’s side. She said nothing once she’d reached it, only looked from Nathan, still sitting in his seat, to Warren, down to his hands where he had them twisted in front of his navel, and then back to Nathan again. She shifted the folders she held in her grip and said nothing, creating a challenge to her presence Warren wasn’t sure, even in his older age, how to exactly cease.

Nathan was the first to break the strangely tense silence, and he did so by holding his hand out in a move so practiced it screamed money despite his appearance otherwise. “Nathan Prescott,” he said in a clipped, slightly gruff tone Warren had never heard him use before. “You’re Maxine Caulfield.”

“Just Max,” she replied in her own practiced way as she took his hand. It broke something of the ice that was coating her, and her shoulders relaxed. Challenge rescinded. “Never Maxine.”

Nathan nodded, and Warren caught something in his eye that said he somehow already knew that despite the flub. “Your work’s fantastic,” he continued. Genuine, Warren was able to conclude, but not fanatic. One photography student to another, not someone who envied her talent. “You’ve got yourself plastered all over the East Coast, and in such a damn short time. Blackwell had to get someone done right, huh? They never shut up about you.”

Max’s features softened. “I guess my name was hard to escape over here, too. I’m sure there are plenty of my fellow graduates who hate my guts for getting lucky.”

“Lucky?” Warren cut in, thrown back into himself by a fire he knew well. Nathan’s eyes flashed to him, but Warren did his best to look only at Max. He hated when she watered down her talent—her self-esteem as a photographer was something Blackwell had crushed, carefully and precisely despite its reputation, and she’d never resurfaced completely from the loss even after making a name for herself. “Shut up, Max. You worked your ass off for what you got, and you’re damn good at what you do. Luck was only a small part of it.”

“It was still a part, I’m not going to be the asshole that says it wasn’t.”

Nathan watched both of them, eyes darting back and forth, his mouth pressed in a line that made Warren think he was holding him back from making his own input.

Warren huffed. “You know what? We’ll argue this tonight. Over drinks. So you can buy me one in apology when I, yet again, prove with charts that luck can’t override what you accomplished yourself.”

Max groaned, but in a way that Warren knew she was actually laughing at him. “Sometimes, I really, really hate being best friends with a professor.”

“No, you don’t,” Warren challenged good-naturedly, and Max smiled the smile she always reserved for when Warren was reminding her he knew her better than that.

“No,” she agreed, “I don’t.”

Nathan looked as if he suddenly thought the universe was playing a joke on him. His narrowed eyes watched Max, hard, but he blinked the moment Max’s attention returned to him, and the look was replaced with one closer to confusion.

“You’re not what I remember,” he said slowly when it was clear they both were paying him their attention.

“You never met me,” Max reminded him, even though it was obvious he meant Warren and only Warren.

“I’ve heard about you in other ways,” Nathan admitted, switching subjects effortlessly despite sounding virtually the same. He looked suddenly uncomfortable with the information, like Max was a dirty secret he shouldn’t have known. “Vic used to write to me sometimes, and you were always mentioned.”

Max brightened. “You don’t say? She never told me that. I knew she was friends with you,” she amended when Nathan only blinked at her, “but I had no idea she was exchanging letters.”

Nathan shrugged. “We were” —he paused, and his jaw tensed slightly before he spoke again— “close in Blackwell. She had my back even at the end there.”

A strange look crossed Max’s face. Warren knew where it came from, because Victoria had been cold and distressed when Max had first arrived at Blackwell, hidden behind sharp words that had at first deterred Max. It had taken a number of months and the intervention of Courtney and Taylor for her to break, and, from there, she became a shell of herself that Max had somehow worked her way past, and then the rest was history. Victoria became fiercely protective of Max, and then Kate and Warren and, sometimes, even Chloe, when they molded themselves into the strange group Max was creating for herself—but she spoke very little of Nathan, or of anything about him, even on the nights where they would get too tired to stand and would talk more about themselves than they ever would had they not been sleep-drunk and too vacant of shits to give in that volatile moment.

Warren had always given far too much away those nights—things he would never have spoken had he not been willing to give the people he was with every last part of him, and _only_ him—but Victoria was a fortress. There were parts of her no one could tread lest she gave them the key, and Nathan had always been an impenetrable door with its very own Gandalf situated right out front. And no one had questioned that. Not even Chloe.

Nathan had been something they all just wanted to forget.

“She’s a very loyal person to the ones she’s chosen,” Max agreed gently. “Saved my butt on more than one occasion.”

“She was the only thing I had left that meant anything to me,” was Nathan’s reply, and it took a beat for the words to register their true meaning, because he’d spoken them as if he were talking about a favorite shirt and not the thing he had thrown away at the end of it all. Max went visibly rigid the moment she understood what he meant, and Warren seemed to have lost all motor function of his tongue. Nathan’s eyes only flashed between them silently.

Something heavy blanketed the air between them, making Warren feel as if he were trying to breathe molasses. Despite always being the man with the silver tongue, the way of the word, the gift of gab that got him into many a sticky situation—he had not a single shitting clue what to say next.

Finally, Nathan looked away. His head tilted to the side, pressing the point of his sharp chin into his own shoulder, then he lifted a hand and rubbed at his eyes, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead.

It did little for the atmosphere, but something started to crack. By the time Nathan readjusted his glasses, Warren felt a little less like he was inhaling gelatin into his lungs. Both he and Max shifted on their feet, and something about Max caught Nathan’s eye, because he sat up straight like someone had stuck him with a hot poker.

“You’re married?” asked Nathan as he leaned their way, surprised. He stared at where Max held her files in both her hands. Suddenly, everything was normal again. Or—as normal as it could get, considering the circumstances.

Max startled slightly, her left hand twitching away for just a split second before she shifted her folders and thrust the hand out delicately with a grin. Her engagement ring sparkled from where it sat nestled against her plain wedding ring. “Three years in September.”

“And you didn’t invite me?” Nathan leered. A spasm seemed to cross his face the moment he said it, and he blinked once, twice, then he looked at his feet and said, strangely honest, “Shit. That’s— Congratulations, Max.”

Warren didn’t miss the way his eyes darted to Warren’s hand, and, before he could think better of the action, Warren blurted out, “Not to me.”

Max immediately snorted. Warren gave her a deadpan look. Nathan only looked baffled.

“That was rude,” Warren grumbled. “Being married to me isn’t _that_ outlandish, come on.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Max replied, an innocent smile directed at him.

“You didn’t need to. I know how you work.”

“You were a decent contender, admittedly,” Max said simply, one slim shoulder rising in a half-shrug of a gesture that didn’t make Warren want to roll his eyes any less. “You never really gave that crush you had your all, though, and you know it.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “You practically _set me up_ with my wife, actually, even though she and I already knew each other. You foiled yourself. Maybe the idea _is_ outlandish.”

“Yeah, well,” Warren started, and then didn’t finish. He’d had his crush on Max, and it had been one hell of a crush, but it had lasted all of a single school semester before he’d realized he had more on his plate than Max deserved, and he was too caught up on something— _someone_ —else to really give the crush his all. So he’d stepped aside, and Chloe stepped up. And Warren pushed it along.

And in the mix of time he’d had between him and his unconventional group of friends, he’d been more okay with his perpetual status of wingman than anticipated, and he’d never bothered to change it.

He loved Max, sure. But it was never meant to be the love he would want for her should he have married her. And, besides. Max was good for Chloe, and Warren wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Shifting around in his seat, Nathan’s eyes darted back and forth between them, his glasses just eskew enough that Warren felt the itch to reach out and right them.

“You know each other that well?” he asked, and Warren was suddenly, violently reminded Nathan likely knew virtually nothing from the years after he had been incarcerated, and letters could only tell him so much.

“Maybe _too_ well,” said Max, nearly touching on sardonic with her tone. “We were roommates for a few years right out of Blackwell.”

“We were practically roommates while _still in_ Blackwell,” Warren pointed out. “You guys were always crashing my room. I know you remember the rumors, because you let Victoria perpetuate one to the point where Wells called me in over it.” He glanced at Nathan, pulling a face. “There’s nothing quite as awkward as having to listen to your principal remind you the rules of the dormitories because someone reported you, thinking you were having fivesome orgies every night.”

“I still think it was Steve,” Max muttered, meaning to be heard. “He was getting back at us for when Vic told him his right hand was all the action he was ever going to get after he asked to join us.”

“Steve? Steve _Hackney?”_ Nathan repeated, his face screwing up. “Good call. No one has bad enough taste to let fucking _Steve Hackney_ in on their fake orgies.”

“See?” Max said, holding her hand out in a gesture at Nathan, like that did anything for a point she no longer had to prove.

“We weren’t even doing anything!” Warren tried, but it was lost as Nathan held out a fist Max’s way and Max, miracle of all miracles, didn’t even miss a beat to fist-bump it.

What the hell was even _happening_ here?

Nathan Prescott was fist-bumping his best friend in the auditorium of the school they had all very nearly attended together, save for the fact a specific one of them had gotten arrested for assisted murder? Over a story about fake orgies and a shitty dorm-mate? Nathan Prescott, the guy he had spent the past ten years borderline obsessing over because he’d accidentally (yes, accidentally, he refused to see it any other way when no part of it was strictly intentional) made out with him in a school shower a few hours before said arrest?

What the actual _shit_ was Warren’s life right now?

Then, abruptly, Warren realized something about the whole scenario. “Wait a minute. How did you even get in here?”

Max blinked, like the thought hadn’t occurred to her and she was suddenly horrified it hadn’t, because outsiders shouldn’t have been able to simply waltz onto the school grounds and into the auditorium. She looked at Warren, and then at Nathan. The smile Nathan gave them in return could peel paint.

“I know how to sneak around this school like I was born to do it. Security’s gotten real lax in the time I’ve been gone, so it wasn’t hard.”

Warren shifted on his feet uncomfortably.

“Relax,” said Nathan softly when the tension returned to the air between them. “I wasn’t the dangerous one, that’s why they let me go.”

Warren didn’t say how Nathan had been plenty dangerous in his own right even before his involvement with Mark Jefferson and Rachel Amber had come to light, because he didn’t think the moment was really right for such a blow. He also wasn’t a total asshole.

Instead, he stayed silent, because he didn’t have a freaking clue of what he _should_ say in response to something like that.

And, like the knight she was, Max came to the rescue. “Let’s walk,” she said, her free hand slipping around Warren’s arm at the elbow. “I don’t have to lecture for a couple hours, let’s get the hell out of this stuffy place. I need some fresh air.”

Warren looked to Nathan. Nathan pursed his lips, shrugged, and then pulled himself from his seat and followed dutifully behind as Max led the way off the academy grounds.

* * *

They went to the beach.

Specifically, the stretch of beach that sat across from the diner, because if there was anything Warren and Max had spectacular memories of, it was that specific section where the land met the sea, where he’d lost so many half-drunken wrestling matches against Chloe before they all just fell into the sand and listened to the waves crash them into a cold lull bordering sleep. Kate would always be the one to coax them all back to their feet, the one to keep them from going too far off the edge when school felt like too much and Chloe was toeing the line of kidnapping them all and fleeing the state with twelve dollars to her name and a half gallon of gas between them all. She was the rational thought among their chaotic existence that only worsened the closer they all grew, pulling Warren from the timid kid he had been into a creature of spontaneity and gusto that Chloe never did anything but add fire to, and even she couldn’t keep too much of a hold on any of them once Victoria waltzed her way into the fray and turned Kate’s attention solidly elsewhere.

And when it went from Max and Chloe and Kate and Warren to Max and Chloe and Kate and Warren _and Victoria,_ they all had lost any semblance of shits to give outside of the classroom, and Warren proceeded to have the best time of his life just living through all the things Victoria could get them to do.

It took time before that happened, though, for sure. Victoria had plenty of beef with Chloe to start. As it turned out, however, losing someone you love, to death or to another kind of world where you cannot follow, was a kind of bonding no one could really avoid, and Chloe and Victoria fell into each other in ways neither of them had anticipated, and eventually they all became closer to one being than to five. Max and Chloe and Kate and Warren and Victoria.

And they made memories everywhere they could, too many of them taking place on that very beach.

“How much you want to bet our names are still hidden under the stairs?” Max said as they passed the diner on the other side of the street.

Warren glanced in the same direction, zeroing in on the same steps he’d both climbed, ran back down, and then slowly climbed again in less than a full day’s time. “Looks like the same wood, so, jack shit. You’d win that one hands down.”

Nathan, who had joined them on the bus for the ride over and sat quietly as the familiar haunts passed them all by, chose this moment to finally speak up again. “You wrote your names on the diner’s stairs?”

Max flipped her hand out in some kind of gesture Warren didn’t know the origin—or the meaning, actually—of. “We were bored. Hanging out outside the diner waiting for breakfast hours to open up. Warren chased a bird under them and, for some reason I can’t remember, we all tried to follow.”

“Oh, yeah, that was the day I got that massive splinter in my elbow,” said Warren, his hand ghosting over the elbow in question as the memory sprang to life. Victoria had been the only one not to join them under the stairs, but her name was there, right next to Kate’s. “That thing hurt like a bitch!”

“How much could I pay you to go check?” Max goaded.

“Zilch. Not on my life. I’m too old for that shit, Max!” Warren protested when Max tried to give him a pleading look. He hesitated, and then relented with, “Let’s see how drunk I get tonight and then ask me again.”

Max grinned. “Oh, that’s a deal.”

“The football team used to do shit like that,” Nathan said offhandedly, reminding Warren that he had stopped speaking again in favor of Warren and Max’s remembered antics, his gaze still fixed on the diner. “Not sure if they ever got caught, though. I wasn’t exactly invited to their hell-raising.”

Max tilted her head in his direction. She looked him up and down, like she was assessing him as a subject for her next photo shoot. “You hung out with the football team?”

Nathan leveled her with a look. “I was _on_ the football team,” he said dryly.

“You did a decent amount of hell-raising on your own,” Warren cut in quickly, before Max could dig herself into a hole. Nathan seemed leagues more stable than he had the last time Warren had seen him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, and Max, never having met Nathan before now, didn’t actually have any idea of who she was messing with.

Nathan’s eyes unmistakably lit up. “The Vortex Club. God, miss that shit a lot.”

Max tilted her head. “Another plot point of many of Victoria’s stories.”

“Good ones?”

“Eeeeh,” Warren offered, wincing. “Good until she starts talking about how they dissolved without their founder and loads of people turned on her.”

And, just like that, everything went still. The wind still blew faintly around them, the ocean still moved gently behind them, the blood still pumped furiously through Warren’s veins thanks to an accelerating heartbeat—but everything felt as if it had suddenly come to a full stop as Nathan’s back went rigid, his eyes narrowing to a dangerous glare that seemed directed at the universe itself.

“People went after Vic for the parties?” he said, calmly, but with a deadly undertone that sent shivers down Warren’s spine and curdled something deep in his gut.

Victoria hadn’t told him about that, Warren realized. Shit.

“Because they stopped,” Warren clarified quietly. He couldn’t keep his voice strong enough for more than a whisper, and it annoyed him how easily he cowered on instinct. He had more backbone than this, and he knew it. “No one cared that you were out of the picture—they put it on her.”

Nathan’s eyes blazed. His hands fisted tightly, holding tension in the air by his hips, and just when Warren was preparing for the explosion, it all suddenly whoosed out of Nathan’s entire person with a single, long exhale. Warren caught Max giving him a look of confusion from the corner of his eye as he watched Nathan lift a hand and press his fingers into the bridge of his nose, sending his glasses askew.

“It was because of me,” he said softly. “She was my right-hand. We weren’t the only place to catch a buzz, but I left a lot of shit behind I shouldn’t have.”

“You were seventeen, Nathan,” Max told him gently, effectively surprising the shit out of Warren. He had thought her there for his protection only, but now she was allowing herself to be firmly involved in a past that had come before she set foot on the Blackwell Academy campus. “That one isn’t your fight. It should never have been a fight at all.”

Nathan looked up at her, his hand dropping back to his side. He didn’t say anything, but, after a moment, he nodded his head, accepting her reasoning, as simple as it was. The he turned and walked towards the beach, leaving Max and Warren alone on the sidewalk.

“This is so fucking wild,” Max said once Nathan was far enough away not to hear them. They both watched him traverse the sand, Max with her index and middle fingers curled against Warren’s pinky and ring fingers—a kind of hand-holding they always did unconsciously but consistently, especially when one of them was stressing over something.

“Tell me about it.”

“I didn’t even know the guy, and now he’s here, and we’re walking with him around the same town he killed someone in?”

“He didn’t kill her, Max,” Warren corrected her, almost so quietly he didn’t even hear himself.

Max only looked up at him, first with the edges of confusion, and then with a light of understanding that Warren didn’t know the basis of.

“Oh,” was all she said, like a breath.

Warren’s gaze darted to her. “Oh, what?”

She shook her head. “You need to talk to him.”

“I— What?”

“You need to talk to him, Warren.” She removed her hand from his and used it to give his hip a light push. “I can tell. There’s something there I don’t know about, and me being here isn’t going to help anything.”

Warren tried his best to feign bafflement, but he was never a very good liar, and a perchance for dishonesty didn’t suddenly start right then and there. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She only smiled her smile. “I’ll see you tonight, okay? Text me if anything goes amiss.”

And then she leaned in and kissed his cheek and was gone before he could do more than sputter a weak, undefined protest for her to stay.

And, thus, he was left to deal with Nathan. Alone.

He didn’t even have time to gear himself up before going after Nathan, either, because almost the moment Max was out of sight Nathan turned around and realized she was gone. If he hadn’t immediately turned back to face the ocean, Warren might have waited at least a few minutes to see if he’d come back up to the sidewalk, giving Warren a few moments to steel himself for the inevitable interaction. But Nathan did, and Warren found himself walking through the sand almost before he even realized he was doing it.

“I didn’t mean to scare her away,” said Nathan the second Warren was close enough to hear, causing Warren to stop short.

“What? No, you— She wasn’t—”

“I know what I do to people, Graham. Don’t bullshit me.”

Warren resisted the sudden urge to stomp his foot. _“No_. You didn’t scare her away. It wasn’t like that.”

Nathan turned and eyed Warren like he wasn’t sure why Warren was still spewing bullshit, but something in Warren’s expression must have told a story Warren himself couldn’t, because Nathan’s features softened, and Warren had to look away before they could have a chance reform into something else, or before Warren could react in a way he couldn’t take back.

It was quiet for a moment between them, then, the ocean its own kind of silence in the space all around. While Warren was gearing himself up to break it, Nathan did him the honor with one of the last things Warren expected him to say: “I’m sorry.”

Warren’s head snapped up. Nathan was watching him, those haunted blue eyes hooded, his mouth lilted down in a small frown. Warren noticed, in that strong daylight, that he was already graying at the temples, despite the fact he wasn’t even thirty yet.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” Nathan repeated, “for going at you in the showers that night. You were just trying to make sure I was okay.”

Warren blinked in shock. “You— You remember all of that?”

Nathan looked away. When he laughed, it was a single, dry laugh of self-depreciation. “Are you kidding? I dwelled on that for years. It was the thing that got me through the first few months, when they were trying to figure out what medication I was supposed to be on to keep me in check. I probably remembered it wrong during that time, I focused so hard on the fact you asked me if I was alright, but it kept me from losing my shit every second I was in there.” He laughed again, and this time there was a thread of hate buried in the sound. “I remembered how it actually was later. You know, ‘That one time some kid bothered to care and check up on me, and then I went and made out with him inside the school showers.’ I was a real shithead. Being medicated helped me remember that.” He hesitated, looking suddenly, shockingly abashed. “I almost wrote you a letter.”

Warren wasn’t sure what to do with this information—he’d been stuck on the memory of the incident and trying not to violently react when it had been dropped on him—so he did the bare minimum: he blinked. Twice.

“Oh,” he added on when that immediately felt insufficient. “You were going to—to write to me?”

“You were pretty important to me, even if it wasn’t mutual. I obviously came to my senses before anything happened.”

Warren didn’t say right then and there how he wished Nathan had written a letter—any letter, anything at all—because he wasn’t sure he had the balls to back the statement up. It wouldn’t be a lie, but Warren wasn’t so sure it would be anymore a truth. Nathan was an obsession he’d had—but not a reality. A letter might have only made things worse, and he’d had a hard enough time letting Nathan go in the first place.

Which is to say, he never did at all.

Instead, he swallowed and said, “I instigated it. It became mutual.”

Nathan’s expression crumpled to confusion. His mouth opened slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

“I kissed you first,” Warren clarified.

“No, you didn’t. I— You came in, asked me if I was okay, and I lost my shit and started at you.” His eyelashes fluttered rapidly, like he was questioning himself. “Didn’t I?”

Warren had always wondered if Nathan had been high on something that night. Nathan had been the type of kid who was always doing something, whatever fancy drug his money could buy him that week, bought from places Warren was always too clean-cut and worried about to investigate. _Warren_ had not been high on anything, and he remembered the incident with a clarity that bordered on painful. Nathan’s memory however, whatever it might be, appeared to not be completely true to reality.

“No,” Warren replied softly, unsure how much he wanted to change—and maybe ruin—something that Nathan had obviously held close for years. “You were crying. I kissed you. I wanted you to stop.” He stopped and made a startled sound that he’d intended to be a laugh. It only made Nathan look at him like he was questioning his sanity. “You were an asshole,” Warren said in reply to the look. “You picked on everyone at that school, and I still went and did that because I couldn’t handle the school dicklord crying his eyes out in the dorm showers.”

A smile coated in irony sprung to Nathan’s lips. “That’s why you did it? Because you were uncomfortable I was crying?”

“Can you blame me?”

Nathan didn’t answer. Instead he said, “You could have just punched me. That would have snapped me out of it.”

Warren shook his head. “Asshole or not, I wasn’t going to hurt someone who was already falling to pieces. You were hurting enough. I wasn’t going to add to that.”

Nathan pursed his lips. “All these years and I thought I was the one who kissed you against your will.”

“Uh. We made out. Like,” Warren held his hands out and made a vague gesture even he wasn’t totally sure the meaning of, “ _really_ made out. There was no one-sided thing there. How could you have thought I wasn’t into it? Hell, I was sixteen! I was all for any action I could get at that age. I had a hard-on for a solid hour afterwards that I was too emotionally compromised to touch.”

Nathan’s face wrinkled. “That’s too much information.”

“Sorry,” Warren amended sheepishly.

Nathan’s hands scraped up his face, dislodging his glasses again. “Jesus,” he hissed, his mouth unobscured from the press of his palms. “That just throws one hell of a wrench into the whole damn fire.”

Warren didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

Nathan continued scrubbing his face for a moment, the scratching noise of skin against faint stubble somehow louder than the ocean when it happened, and then Warren was suddenly, viscerally aware that Nathan even _had_ stubble to scrape against. He had to immediately squash the intrusive wonder of what that must feel like, because he already _knew_ exactly what it felt like, and the fact the stubble belonged to Nathan Prescott didn’t change a damn thing about that.

“So, what, you liked it then?” Nathan said, causing Warren to realize he was staring.

Warren cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah?” He paused. “Wait, liked what?”

Nathan’s lips twitched and he ducked his head. “The making out part, before I ditched you.”

“That’s a whole ass understatement, dude. You’re not the only one that thought about it for way longer than was probably healthy.”

 _Bigger understatement, Warren,_ he silently told himself.

“Decent distraction tactic, I’ll give you that much.”

“I never did find out the real reason you were crying,” Warren admitted quietly, but only after he had a second to decide if he even wanted to go there before realizing, uh, duh. Of course he did.

Nathan didn’t reply right away. He sighed first, long and heavy, and then said, “Yeah. That was never brought up in the trial exactly. I tipped off the cops about Rachel right after I left you that night.”

It was so casual an admittance that, at first, Warren didn’t comprehend it. A trick Nathan seemed to have picked up while he was away, because Warren was pretty sure Nathan was too manic to have managed so casual a thing before. Then, the meaning clicked sharply, and Warren’s brain went into a tailspin.

“Morning, actually, I guess,” Nathan corrected offhandedly, but Warren barely registered it.

“Anonymously?” Warren croaked, unable to think of any other way that particular fact could have been left out of everything surrounding the trial. Nathan had never been mentioned as the reason why they had finally located Rachel’s whereabouts—Rachel’s remains—and it had never occured to Warren until now, _right now_ , that Nathan had been the one to lead them there.

 _“Fuck!”_ he had said in that shower stall that night, Warren forgotten in the face of whatever war was playing out in his mind. _“I don’t want to do this!”_

 _That_ had been what he’d meant, hadn’t it? Telling the cops about Rachel and dooming himself to a fate he didn’t know another way around?

Warren’s head felt too full. He was trained in astrophysics, was a mentor in molecular biology, regularly calculated distances to fabled black holes so far away the human brain couldn’t actually fathom the breadth, and _this_ was causing him to overload.

“I found her folder,” Nathan continued instead of answering Warren’s question. “You know, those binders Jefferson kept? I know you read the case report. I found hers, by accident, before he had managed to clean it up like all the others, and there was this—” He stopped and swallowed thickly, his eyes fluttering for a single heartbeat before he started again, “—and I realized she’d been killed and buried. I thought— I thought she’d just run away when she first vanished. She was always talking about leaving, and I thought she’d just gone and done it. But then I found the file and—” He stopped again, his eyes closing then in the face of the memory. “I told the cops to search the junkyard—the place he scribbled in the corner of a Post-It note in the code we used—and they found her.”

Warren couldn’t help but stare. Really, it was all he could do, because his brain had officially gone offline. “You incriminated yourself.”

“I deserved it.”

“You deserved to be thrown in jail with a false sentence?”

Nathan gave Warren a cold look. “I helped orchestrate a murder, Warren.”

“But you basically confessed by telling the cops. If you’d only—”

“And yet I didn’t. Because I thought I deserved a ruling where I didn’t get off for snitching.”

Warren hesitated. “Thought?”

“I got a lot of therapy to help override what I was brought up to think,” Nathan told him with a wry smirk. “Though I can’t say I’d have handled it any better even if my therapist at the time _did_ know what the hell he was doing with me.” Nathan stopped. Then, like he was whispering to deities that wouldn’t listen, he said, “He warned my parents. They didn’t listen.”

Warren’s mouth hung open, a plethora of words crowding his tongue to spring free, but none going so far as to make the jump.

Nathan looked up at him when enough time passed where he said nothing. “Did I break you? Was it that shocking a revelation for someone who was on the team that discovered exactly what theory applies to the time-space discrepancy in other galaxies?”

And Warren thought he couldn’t get more shocked. It was enough that Nathan even knew what it was he’d just said to Warren, but that he knew Warren was one of the members that fronted the study?

He snapped his mouth shut when he realized he’d been standing there with it open and then said, with a minimal stutter of astonishment to start, “Y-you know about that?”

“We get TV in prison, idiot,” Nathan said, but he was a step away from laughing. His eyes crinkled at the corners, bringing to life crow’s feet that did nothing to falter the strangely sharp attractiveness Nathan Prescott had become in the ten years since Warren had last seen his face. “Books and internet, too. I read your dissertation.”

Warren had to struggle not to ask, “And you _understood_ it?” because that would have been flat out rude.

Instead he asked, “Why?”

And, to Warren’s immense shock, Nathan actually blushed. “Obsessed. It was something to focus on, instead of— Instead of _him.”_

Warren closed his eyes for a brief moment, dread pooling in his gut. “Guess anything was better than Jefferson,” is what he whispered, but it felt louder than he meant it to be.

Nathan, to his credit, didn’t even wince. “Anything and everything, yeah. Fucking asstwat. He was a hard battle to overcome, even after I did what I did to him. Everything was just—so _fucking_ fucked _up.”_

Warren only looked at Nathan, unsure of what to say. Warren hadn’t been there, and learning via the media and other outside sources didn’t give him the right to have anything of substance to add to a traumatizing ordeal Nathan himself had been a key player in. Nathan didn’t seem to need Warren’s input, though, because his mouth curled suddenly into a scowl, and he looked into the ocean as if he were about to challenge it to a duel.

“Do you know what it’s like to be so desperate for validation that you allow yourself to be manipulated by someone you _know_ doesn’t actually care? I knew what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t—know the extent. Not really. You can trick yourself out of knowing the consequences of your actions easily, especially with my mental state at the time, and having someone guiding me down that hellhole didn’t help anything. I didn’t understand everything that was happening, and what I did understand I chose to ignore, and Mark, he was—” Nathan stopped abruptly, swallowed, then snorted a quiet laugh to himself. It was almost as if Warren wasn’t even there. “You want a silver tongue? Cut it out of that guy’s mouth, you’ll never find another more sterling. I was fucked up, but I needed what he gave me. Until I found out the truth.”

His last sentence was whispered so quietly, Warren found himself leaning in to hear. It wouldn't be until Nathan looked up at him from beneath his lashes that Warren would realize how close he was, but, the moment he did, he snapped himself back to attention like a kid who’d been caught cheating off of someone else’s test.

Nathan’s lips quirked into a semblance of a smile, a jarring contrast to his grim admittance.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Nathan continued gently, that ghosted smile creating a strange facade Warren’s mind couldn’t seem to understand. “I decided it didn’t matter enough until it was too late.” He looked away, turning his attention onto the roiling ocean before them. His lips pressed a thin line in his face, a muscle in his jaw fluttering with tension, and then he said, “I guess I do still think I deserved everything I got in the end. I deserved it, because I was a terrible kid, and I needed to get what I had coming to me. Isn’t that how the world wants it to be?”

And Warren felt his heart seize in his chest. Because he wasn’t wrong—but that didn’t make it right. Back when he’d been sixteen, maybe he might have agreed. Previous to witnessing Nathan’s breakdown? He would have agreed without even thinking about it, because he was a kid, and things like that didn’t always process in his brain quite right, regardless of his overall intellect. Consequences weren’t always a step in the ladder when it came to his deduction of accountability back then, and he knew he’d have said Nathan needed his sentence to make up for all the bad he’d done. But that was before.

After? After, he would have thought a little harder on it. Maybe still come to a similar conclusion, but he at least would have given a little perspective before doing so.

Now, though? Now he knew people had ignored the signs Nathan was giving off like a siren singing his own death song, and he couldn’t stand there and say Nathan deserved everything he got when no one listened to him until it all had been said and done. There was always more to the world than a black side and a white, and Nathan was so painfully gray at his core that it hurt Warren to even think about.

“No,” Warren whispered. “No, you didn’t.”

Nathan seemed to freeze, his shoulders squaring up and his back straightening. He looked so strange with ten years of time behind him—no longer the skinny kid on a drug-and-alcohol diet. His significantly more Walmart-brand clothing fit him well, too, though Warren wondered how long it would take for him to fall back into his designer ways, or if he would ever bother to at all. Warren knew there was money waiting for Nathan—the whole damn state, maybe even the country, knew _something_ was going to be there for him. As the media put it, however, it didn’t put any more targets on Nathan's back than he already would have once being released, so laying low didn’t really seem an option so much as a necessity, and maybe Walmart was the way to blend in.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said.

“You didn’t do it, though—” Warren tried, but Nathan cut him off with a hand placed suddenly on the curve of his shoulder.

And, softly, Nathan said, “Not that. Everything else. I know who I was back then. You still stayed with me, and I’m sorry I wasn’t the kind of person to you that would have deserved that in return for his actions.”

Warren wanted to shrug—wanted to snort and smile or blow off Nathan’s words—but he couldn’t. Because he would be lying too much if he said Nathan wasn’t that kind of kid they both knew he had been, or that it hadn’t mattered, because it had. Just not enough for Warren to leave Nathan to his own devices. So, he said nothing, and Nathan’s fingers tightened their hold on Warren’s shoulder before they dropped again. Warren did his best not to think about their loss as Nathan shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Guess I really shouldn’t be asking this, but,” he started, then pursed his lips. “Would you want to be friends?”

Warren could only blink at him in astonishment, feeling strangely like a kid again. “Yeah—yes. Sure. Shit, yeah, definitely.”

And, because the day hadn’t had enough surprises packed into it already, Nathan continued, “Would you … want to be more?”

_Teeth against his lower lip, a moan smothered against the palm of a cold, cold hand, his back prickled with goosebumps as his shirt was wrenched from his body and thrown into the dark depths of the shower’s tiles—_

“We—” Warren squeaked unattractively, and Nathan started to _laugh._

“I was shitting you, god, your _face,”_ he said gleefully, and Warren realized right then that he had never seen Nathan like this. Nathan had laughed plenty of times when they’d been younger, but if it hadn’t been at a target of Nathan’s expense, it had been for some other reason that bordered on nefarious, and the laughter had never come close to what Nathan was creating now. This laughter was genuine, happy in a way Warren hadn’t realized someone like Nathan Prescott could be, and he felt something strong surge up his throat at the sight of it.

He wanted more, he realized with a jolt of an emotion he had no name for. He just didn’t know how to get it.

Warren swallowed thickly and reached out a hand towards Nathan’s face and was mortified to find it trembled, and Nathan’s laughter died like a flame doused in water.

“Oh,” Nathan said, looking at the hand, his expression changing completely. He looked lost, open, and exactly like he had that night when he’d been prepared to lose it all to a truth he hadn’t wanted to tell.

Warren’s fingers curled into his palm. He dropped his hand again. It wasn’t rejection—he hadn’t asked for anything, hadn’t even known what he was doing—but something, _something_ , about it still stung.

Warren looked away.

He would have missed the action of Nathan taking a step towards him if he hadn’t already been so close.

“Close your eyes, Graham,” Nathan said. Warren closed his eyes. He felt the heat of Nathan first, and the rest came in a rush immediately after that.

Nathan leaned in and pressed his lips to Warren’s. Gently, like he was saying sorry years past when he meant to give the apology. Even when he pulled away, Warren kept his eyes shut, releasing tension from every part of him with each moment that ticked by. Savoring the feeling of finally getting what he had tried so hard to forget about, ten years after the whole mess had been brought to life.

He heard a soft noise, the gentle sound of a wave lapping up behind him, felt the cooling stir of the sea air. This time, he never heard him leave.

But, when Warren opened his eyes again, Nathan was gone.

* * *

Warren didn’t see Nathan again. Not when he returned to the Academy in time to catch the tail end of Max’s lecture, not when they went out for dinner and drinks that night, and not when they ventured back to the diner with enough liquid courage coursing through their veins to hazard a look for those scratched-out names (they were still there in all their glory) and gotten a new set of splinters for their efforts. Nathan was nowhere to be seen, and Warren would have been a big, fat liar if he had said he didn’t desperately wish he had asked for some form of contact before Nathan had vanished on him once again.

But, he hadn't, and so he returned home without a hope to his name, at least until Nathan started creating social media accounts again. Warren didn’t hold out hope, and Max did her job of comforting him when he sulked the entire way to the airport and then some, even though he never told her what exactly it was about. Strangely enough, she never really asked, but Warren didn’t think about that fact until later. Much, much later.

It took two weeks for it to come.

Max and Chloe were over the day it arrived, visiting him on their way down to Washington DC for some sort of art festival Max had been invited to, and Warren had shuffled the junk mail aside and found it nestled between a water bill and something from his Alma Mater asking for money, the address glaring out at him from a corner.

“Arcadia Bay?” Warren said in confusion, lifting the letter up and allowing the others to flop down on the island counter. Max, who had been standing on the other side with her wife looking at pictures on her phone, snapped her head up fast enough to give herself whiplash, and Chloe leaned away from her like she expected Max to suddenly detonate. “Why am I getting mail from Arcadia Bay?”

“What’s the name?” Max asked, already rushing to his side to peer at the letter.

“No name,” said Warren, like she couldn’t see it herself.

Chloe’s face scrunched up. “Who the hell sends a letter without a name on it?”

“Just open it,” Max pushed.

“What? No,” Warren protested. “I don’t recognize the address. What if it has anthrax in it?”

“Oh, please.” Chloe rolled her eyes dramatically, standing up from her position against the counter to join their makeshift huddle. “Who would try to kill you? Some pissed off science nerd from the Academy?”

“Maybe! I could have enemies!”

“Just open it, Warren, Jesus,” said Max, shoving the hand holding the letter closer. “I know who it is.”

Warren and Chloe turned to stare at her.

“How the hell do you know who sent me a letter from Arcadia Bay?” Warren said at the same time Chloe said, “What the hell did you get up to _without me,_ Maximus?”

Max reached out and grasped Warren’s shoulder. Her eyes burned into his, her excitement almost alive. Whatever it was, Warren knew he was going to trust her on this one, and it wasn’t even a choice.

“Open it, Warren,” she told him again, gently, and Warren swallowed before doing exactly as she told.

Warren opened the letter slowly, immediately looking for a name to give the sender, and found his mouth go completely dry in the same moment his heart started to race the second his eyes found a name scrawled at the very bottom.

“Knew it!” Max called excitedly, fist-pumping the air as she turned away in a victory Warren didn’t understand. Chloe only gaped at the piece of paper in Warren’s hands.

“Why the fuck would—” she started, only for Max to grab her and pull her away before she could finish.

Warren barely paid any attention to either of them, too busy staring at the name like it would come to life and start calling him names for his ridiculous actions.

 _Nathan Prescott,_ it said in a script Warren would not assume from him, followed by a number and the tiny words beneath, “Text me when you get this.”

Nathan sent him a letter.

It wasn’t over yet.


End file.
